My MRI today

Will keep you in prayer G/F.

Praying for ya.  Hopefully your spine specialist will be able to give your back some relief with just one surgery.

Dang brother no wonder you are in so much pain. Still praying for you!

Praying for both issues my friend.

Keep you in prayer for both Guilty.

Praying for you!

Thanks everyone. Means a lot to me right now as I'm EXTREMELY down right now. Just having a rough time is all (without much emotional support)..

So I went to the Spine specialist in L.A. and there were no big surprises. I was hoping for maybe some new 2014 special procedure, but it looks like it's gonna be what I expected:
They will open up that area, remove the 4 screws and brackets - then remove the disc between the 2 vertebraes - fill it with bone chips then put longer brackets on, completing it with 6 screws to simply extend what I already have.
golly i cant wait...

Hey, at least they can do something, man.  Imagine if you had to live with the pain for the rest of your life.

Amen brother. Amen.

I am certainly thankful for what they CAN do. My main thing I was hoping to score on was a possible procedure that would cover the entire Lumbar region. To be able to have only one surgery that would fix all the Lumbar discs once and for all.

It just doesn't make sense to repair a section, patch up with hardware, then in 2 to 4 years have the disc above that repair job turn to doo-doo and then we start alllll over again with the next one........

That was my hope to have the specialist agree and tell me this would be possible - then show me some cool pix of how it could be done.... but alas, I will only be getting the surgery for the one disc.  At least I'll have some serious relief when that disc is no longer pinching off my spinal cord.
Then ? Then it's onto my neck ! yay !

Praying for you man. It does seem inconceivable that a procedure like you describe isn't available, but I guess lumbar damage isn't a medically cool injury like a blown knee.

Ow!

Take care.

What's the cause of all this?

Too bad they just can't give you a bionic spine.

Quote :

What's the cause of all this?

The cause is DNA. 
Always had "back aches" off and on through my life as has my Dad and my 2 brothers. I was the "lucky" one of them to get the hereditary degenerative disc disease - advanced. The first time the first Dr looked at my xray, he asked if I had any accidents, sports, auto ? I said only one car accident, but it was no big deal and I walked away from it. He said I had to have had some kind of accident. I assured him I hadn't. That's when I was sent to a specialist and they told me I had a large disc bulge at the common L5 S1 level, and my spine had arthritic growth on almost every level.
Couldn't walk, sit, or anything without terrible pain - only comfort I could get was laying flat on the floor. So I had my 1st surgery 2005 called a partial lamenectomy where they cut 25% of the disc out that was bulging into my nerves.
Surgeon looked at my MRI and told me I cannot lift more than 25 pounds for the rest of my life.
Felt better for almost 2 years when that same disc herniated 9mm into the left side of my spinal cord. They got me in within a couple days due to my excruciating pain and did the full lamenectomy/fusion. Came out great on that surgery in 2007. 
The surgeon told me that due to what he sees on the MRI of my Lumbar and Cervical area, that I would most likely be in a wheel chair by 40.
Welp, I'm 44 and beat the odds. Unfortunately, today I cannot feel parts of my hands and they always have the "pins and needles" feeling in them. I have a herniated disc at L4-5 now (as you can see by the MRI above) which is giving me incredible pain and interrupted sleep every night.

So yeh, long story short   - a couple years after I've had my surgeries and we're all perplexed at the messed up backs in this family, my Dad's mom say's oh, by the way, her brothers and other family members were all in wheel chairs and used canes at very young ages due to their backs (this was back in the 1920s and 30s)- I'm like "wow thanks for the little too late information there granny !"
The scariest part of all this is not so much the pain, or even a wheelchair... it's the affects it can have on other things. Those nerves that are being damaged by the discs pushing into them so hard can actually cause urinary problems and other issues that I'd rather not discuss here. Those are the things that bothers me.

So I'll bet you're sorry you asked    - but that's the long and the short of it.

Staybrite wrote:

Too bad they just can't give you a bionic spine.

 That was almost the exact sentence I asked the physician yesterday.
I said, it's 2014, you'd think we'd have less barbaric measures and more technological ways to "fix" this.

My worry is that it's just gonna keep climbing on up. They fixed L5 S1, so the disc right above that bore all the brunt of the work and ended up herniating.... what's to say after the rip my back open and fuse L4 that the disc ABOVE THAT ain't gonna do the same in a couple years... and so on ? Sigh

Wow man, that sucks. Anything I can think of to say sounds trite but hang in there.

I'll be praying for you.

Hmm, you might want to see about getting a second opinion on your condition.

That WAS the second opinion   
We were told what the procedure would be by Dr Etebar* who's done my previous surgeries. http://www.desert-spine.com/
So we went to Dr Spoonamore** for the 2nd opinion to make sure there isn't anything different/better we could be doing. http://www.uscspine.com/dr-spoonamore.cfm

* Listed in "Top Doctors in America", "America's Top Surgeons"
** USC Spine Specialist in Los Angeles -member of the North American Spine Society, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, and is a reviewer for Spine (journal).


(but thanks for the idea anyways !   )

In that case, go to Mexico and see what they can do

Praying

Thank you Bought4Life


and ThroughTheDark =  

We'll definitely be praying for you as you go through this surgery.  When is it scheduled?

That's my question too, when is your surgery scheduled?
You can count on my prayers too.